There was some CB discussion on this yesterday. I believe tye thought that it definately shouldn't last forever, but that 24 hours was acceptable, which I also think is reasonable. There is a problem of not setting a defined limit (just look what happend to "reasonable length" in terms of copyright in the US). This seems as good a thread as any to discuss that.

If anything, I'd be more worried about people putting CB comments on their home nodes. For instance, ardenhas used to have a CB quote by me which isn't in context at all. In that case, I think the only problem is that the humor value is lost, and I severely doubt that it could be used to convict me anything (unless the government becomes incredibly tyrannical, in which case I'm screwed anyway). I don't mind the quote being there, but it does lack the context of the CB at the time.

----send money to your kernel via the boot loader.. This and more wisdom available from Markov Hardburn.

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Re: CB history - not an hour any more?
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I'll note that I do feel that 24-hours is appropriate at least for certain situations. I don't see much point in viewing the last 24 hours of chatter and told diotalevi so. I don't feel strongly that such should be banned, but that is in part because I just don't see why anyone would implement that since there isn't much point to it. I don't even think diotalevi feels there is much point in it, just that it was easier than implementing something more sensible and probably will be replaced by something more sensible when such is implemented.

The situations I would like to see addressed are:

What was said after I asked for help late yesterday and then had to leave suddenly and so didn't see the answers?

I was chatting publicly yesterday and got a private message in response that I didn't notice at the time. Please show me this private message in context of the public chatter from around that time so I can understand it.

Give me more context for this discussion that I'm reading (which I got to by asking for more context for the discussion I was reading...) up to some point (such as 24 hours ago).

(1) is addressed (a bit awkwardly) by one of diotalevi's new features.

(3) opens up the potential for seeing 24 hours of chatter, just with more effort required. But then, we already only require a small amount of effort for people to log chatter and store it forever. So, if you are worried about your employer using chatter against you, there is nothing stopping them and very little discouraging them from logging every CB utterance you make forever. So I think the whole point of this discussion is fairly small distinctions on the point of 'ease'.

Long-running archives of chatter should not be made public. Why? Because it makes it too easy for someone to use old chatter against a member and we want the CB to remain a place where members can feel "free". So it should be "difficult" to get to old chatter, on some sort of sliding scale (you can see the last 500 seconds of chatter by just visiting this site; you can see the last 1 hour of chatter by knowing where to look).

As for policy, I could support a policy that ties access to chatter from more than one hour ago to either seniority or to "presence" around the time of the conversation. I think it makes sense for senior members to be able to see the previous 24 hours of chatter as part of their involvement in the site (especially those who work on the site). But I'd also like brand new members to be able to access (1) above. But I see no real reason to not deny Anonymous Monk access to chatter that is more than 1 hour old.

Of course, don't think that I or anyone else is deluded into thinking that we really have any power to enforce such a policy even if there appears to be a consensus and such a policy is declared in effect.

Anyway, I've been wanting these features for some time now. Yesterday(?) I threw out the wild suggestion of allowing access to 24 hours of chatter (in the spirit of the CB being a "free" place). Someone wondered in response if people would disapprove of such. I responded (freely) with something very close to "Who the fred cares?!". I was joking (and hope most viewers were savvy enough to at least suspect that I might have been). But the topic of conversation never returned to that point.

I don't want a free-for-all on access to old chatter. I see those 3 features as useful and appropriate. I understand that there probably aren't trivial means of enforcing access control to such features if they are provided somewhere other than the PerlMonks server. So I'll encourage diotalevi to disable (or modify) a couple of his features in the mean time. Perhaps he'll even help implement (1), (2), or (3) at PerlMonks (and perhaps the consensus will be that they are reasonable). These and many other questions will be answered on the next episode of Soap.

I've been more concerned with a separate issue which is attempting to get a better handle on what an otherwise incompetent communicator is trying to say by looking at their previous statements. A lot of people come asking for help here and only give us bits and pieces at a time but if you string together their statements over hours or days the complete picture comes together. For those people I want to do a grep of everything they have said, ever. I sometimes do this.

I've also often used a similar program to http://grenekatz.org/cgi-bin/cbsince to catch up on what was said while I was out for an hour or so (usually because I was interested in what was there when I left). This would be nicer if paged but it was easier to just display everything at once. I don't know what else you were looking for other than displaying less on a single page.

If you string together everything I've ever said, you can just make out that I'd like less displayed per page and some way to restrict access based on seniority (PerlMonks level). But then, if there is little enough concern with making access to 24 hours of chatter "more difficult", then there is little point in doing the second item which is certainly more difficult. I guess we'll see.

My "in the mean time" was suggesting that you remove access to that old of chatter while we wait to see what the consensus is. Note that I'm not demanding this, just asking.